Glittering Minded
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, established relationship. Harry comes home from a tiring day with an unsympathetic Auror partner, and complains to his supposedly sympathetic lover, who concocts a solution to get rid of the tiredness. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Glittering-Minded

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **A bit of angst, Draco being a bit of a bastard

**Rating: **PG-13

**Wordcount:** 3900

**Summary: **Harry comes home after a tiring day with an unsympathetic Auror partner, and complains to his supposedly sympathetic lover, who concocts a plan to get rid of the tiredness.

**Author's Note: **The title is a name for Aphrodite in Sappho's poetry, as translated by A. S. Kline.

**Glittering-Minded**

Harry leaned against the door of their flat as it shut behind him and rubbed his eyes. He wanted to sit down on the floor and go to sleep right there, but Draco would have a fit if he did that. The carpet was soft enough to sleep on, Harry always said, but that would start Draco on another tirade about his deprived childhood, and Harry would rather sleep in a bed than be dragged there.

He stood up, cast his cloak onto the one hook to the right of the door that was his—all the others held Draco's cloaks, hats, half-cloaks, watches for special occasions, and chains of some Potions award or another—and turned left into the kitchen. Draco was bent over the long table, his eye to a floating enchanted lens that apparently functioned like a microscope. The last time Ron and Hermione had visited, Hermione had said that Muggles had had the idea first, and Draco claimed Galileo had stolen it from wizards, and there was a right bloody row that only ended when Harry's friends left.

_Sometimes lots of things end when they leave, _Harry thought, pausing behind Draco to kiss him on the cheek.

"Don't move my face," Draco said, absently swatting out to the side at him and missing completely, due to the fact that Harry had moved on several seconds earlier. "I need to figure out what went wrong with the crystalline structure in this potion."

"Sure," Harry said, and moved away, shaking his head. This would be one of those evenings where Draco fidgeted over dinner and missed half of Harry's words in his eagerness to be back at his experiments. Well, it wasn't like Harry had to have his company. It would have been nice, but it was okay.

Harry didn't bother cooking an elaborate meal; Draco wouldn't notice anyway. He just dumped some of the leftover cream of mushroom soup they'd had the other day into a copper pot, cast a Warming Charm on it, and let it get almost to boiling before he opened the cabinet above the chairs to get a bowl out. Of course, by the time he got it down and started ladling soup into the bowl, Draco had whipped around to look at him.

"It was the addition of the lavender that changed it after all," he announced. "I should have used dragon talons the way I originally intended. What are you _eating_?"

"It's in a bowl and steams and you eat it with a spoon, you figure it out," Harry told him dryly, and then paused so he could look back at Draco. "Didn't the Ministry make trading in dragon talons illegal last year?"

"So?"

Harry once again rolled his eyes, took a seat, and applied himself to his meal. Draco was making disparaging comments about people who couldn't cook, which Harry refused to listen to. He knew from personal experience that Draco had never cooked until after he left Hogwarts. There were always house-elves to take care of it. Which, fine, but not in Harry's house. Kreacher was getting older and older, and Hermione would shriek if Harry let him near boiling water, let alone anything more complicated.

"You could have cooked for me, too."

There were limits. Harry put his spoon down, arranged his bowl precisely in front of him, Summoned a napkin from the stack of them on the counter, and arranged it on his lap before he said, "Sure I could have, if you weren't being a _prat _to me after I had a bloody awful day and left me to deal with it."

"You had an awful day?"

Harry rolled his eyes again. They got regular exercise that way. "Yes, of course I did, though nothing to compare to your exciting day of discovering things wrong with lavender in potions, I'm sure," he muttered, and turned back to his bowl. The soup was hot, and there was a lingering aftertaste of mushrooms that had the potential to be pleasant. That was all Harry could really say for it as a meal.

"I keep telling you, you don't have to work. If you wanted to stay at home and study all day like I do, you could."

"Of course I could," Harry said, and continued to eat. Draco was casting charms in that way that made his wand rattle against everything wooden in the kitchen and showed how very greatly offended he was. If Harry listened too long, it would just join the headache pounding behind his eyes and make him more angry. If he concentrated on the food, the rubbery bits against his tongue where the mushrooms had decayed to the point that they didn't taste of anything, he could think about something else. "If I wanted to be bored out of my skull and know useless things about potions."

"Potions are _not _useless." And now Draco was pouting. Harry knew that particular tone in his voice.

Harry clenched his jaw and said as gently as he could, "Draco. _It doesn't matter. _I'm an Auror because I want to be, and I had a bad day today, and I know you didn't notice, but you can't actually do anything to make it better. Can we just sit in peace? Eat your nice dinner." He winced a little as he spoke, because Draco hated that particular tone from him, but that was fair. Harry hated his whinging.

There was huffy silence from Draco's direction. Harry Summoned the _Daily Prophet _that Draco had as usual left draped over a chair and began to read it. He knew most of the contents already from Vetch reading it aloud to the entire Department today, but he hadn't read the Quidditch section, and Harry went there for some peace and quiet.

He was in the middle of an earnest interview with the Chudley Cannons' new Seeker when something dropped in front of him, nearly hard enough to spill into his lap. Harry moved his bowl and the paper and looked up with a Drying Charm on his lips and something far worse in his eyes.

Draco glared at him over the top of the paper. "_There_," he said, and turned to the other side of the table, further than he usually sat from Harry.

Harry glared down at the plate in front of him, and then blinked. He thought Draco had probably had Malfoy house-elves smuggle over a meat pie again, but it was steaming, and the smell that came out of it was so thick and flavorful Harry licked his lips. He picked up his fork and started eating, sighing when the flavor practically drenched his tongue.

"Thanks," he added, although he knew that heating the food up would have been the extent of Draco's contribution, and a Potions master ought to be able to muster a good Warming Charm.

Draco sniffed at him, but there was a smile buried in his mouth before he looked back down at his plate, and although Harry read his paper and Draco concentrated on his food for the rest of dinner, things were back to normal.

* * *

"You never mentioned why it was such an awful day."

Harry blinked one eye open. They'd moved into the drawing room, a place they'd both wanted to decorate, and in the end compromised on by making two walls the deep green and earth-brown Draco had favored and the other two the dashing red and silver combination Harry had wanted. Hermione told them every time she visited that it looked horrid, but Hermione didn't live in the middle of the storm that was their relationship.

"Hmm?" Harry turned his head. Draco sat at the piano in the corner, his fingers dipping and sliding along the keys. He had his head turned towards Harry, though, which meant he was paying attention even if he was currently more interested in some peeling paper on the wall. "Oh, it was nothing, really."

"Enough nothing that you let me suffer while you sulked in silence," Draco said, and slid his fingers up and down the piano again when Harry opened his mouth to object that that wasn't what had happened, actually. "Tell me."

Harry rolled his eyes a little, but sat up and patted the couch beside him. Draco took his time sauntering over, his head ducked and his eyes fastened on Harry's face as though Harry would change into someone else suddenly. Harry maintained his smile as well as he could, and Draco finally sat down beside him with a small, huffing breath, and leaned his head on Harry's shoulder.

Harry stroked his hair back, and murmured, "You know Hansen Lark, of course."

"The man you complain about every time you come home?" Draco let his head loll back as Harry petted his hair, his eyes narrowed. "Yes, of course I would know him. Perhaps you should tell me what he did to you, so that I don't have to imagine the worst and hunt him down to tear out his windpipe."

Harry would have laughed, but as always when Draco made a threat like that, he never knew how to take it. He ended up clearing his throat instead and saying, "So. Anyway. It was all right when he was assigned as my partner the first time. That was a temporary partnership for a case, and then I went back to Ron."

Draco hummed, under his breath, so that Harry could only really know he was doing it because he felt the vibrations in Draco's throat. "It's good to know that Weasley has a singular talent for understanding you. Too bad it's also a single one."

Harry flicked his fingers lightly against Draco's ear and went on. "Lark told me today that we would be partnered again for the foreseeable future, until Ron's over the aftereffects of that curse he got hit with last week."

Draco raised one eyelid; he looked as if he was going to sleep, but Harry could feel how tight his muscles were coiled, and doubted it. "Isn't that unusual? Weasley should be back to work soon. I thought they preferred you to wait in the office doing paperwork until your normal partner is back on his feet."

"Yeah," Harry said. "That's what I thought, too."

"Is this something Lark arranged, or the Ministry?" Draco turned around and wriggled his feet impatiently at Harry until Harry took them into his lap and started massaging them. "Not that I think Lark is an especially big fan of yours."

Harry shook his head and kept it bowed as he worked his thumbs into the soles of Draco's feet. Draco wore ridiculously thick socks, and ridiculously thick black trousers, for that matter, as though he thought their house would crack open and dump them into the middle of a glacier any second. At least he was a wizard and knew Cooling Charms. "No, but apparently the case we were partnered on was the first one he'd solved in years. He wants to up his success rate, and I'm the means."

Draco clucked his tongue. "What was that little thing Kingsley likes to threaten you with? Being sacked if you don't remain 'relevant' to the Aurors? It sounds like you've found someone even less relevant than you."

Harry gave him a dig with his thumbs for that, but no more. Draco only thought Harry was useless as an Auror because he could stay home and sit on his Galleons if he wanted to, not because he didn't solve cases. "You might remember that one of the new Wizengamot members is named Calpurnia Lark."

Draco paused for a second, then said, "Now much becomes clear," in a voice so like Trelawney's that Harry snickered. He reached out and put a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Was it just his attitude?"

Harry clenched his jaw. "No."

"And are you going to make me kiss it out of you?" Draco asked in the same voice. He leaned closer and breathed gently into Harry's face. Harry jerked his head away, nose wrinkling.

"Your breath smells like that tar you were mixing up last week," he told Draco flatly.

Draco lifted his nose. "That was hippogriff feathers mixed in with unicorn mud, just so you know."

Harry decided not to ask about "unicorn mud"—hopefully it would just turn out to be the mud from a unicorn's hoofprint or something—and went back to massaging Draco's feet. "He told me that I would work with him. I said fine. He said he expected me to do my best work. I resented the implication that I would have been shirking, but I said fine."

"With steam coming out of your ears as if you were a late-stage Pepper-Up Potion, I'm sure," Draco muttered. "You're not subtle about people you dislike, you know."

Harry didn't bother to hide the eye-roll this time, though it was one of the things that most offended Draco. "Sorry. Should I have talked about how thrilled I was to be working with him? I'm not a good liar, either. He would have known something was wrong immediately."

"Tell me what else he said. Stretching it out does us no good." Draco pushed at Harry's shoulder, nearly hard enough to sway him back against the couch.

"He said that I was a lazy bastard," Harry told Draco's feet, bending over them so there was no chance he would accidentally glance up and get a glimpse of Draco's face. "That I was trading on my popularity, and that any cases I solved were probably to Ron's credit. Or his, the last time we temporarily partnered. That I'm the Golden Boy depending on my fame, that everyone knows I probably slept with Kingsley to get to where I am, and that I had too much sympathy for Death Eaters and everyone knew that, considering everyone knew I was fucking one."

"I wondered when we would get to it," Draco said calmly. "You knew insults about me would be inevitable when we started dating."

"That wasn't all," Harry muttered.

Draco leaned threateningly towards his face again. Harry ducked his head and continued.

"He said—he said that you were only with me for my fame, that you didn't care, that you never had. How could someone who hated me and who'd been on the wrong side of the war willingly sleep with the person who'd won it? He gave me this little lecture about pure-blood pride and how he thought I was the worse person, because I was sleeping with someone who would always despise me, and bringing you down by doing it. If I wasn't around, you might have found someone who wouldn't tarnish your reputation in the eyes of everyone you used to consider a friend."

Silence. Draco's hand came back to his shoulder, but it rubbed gently this time, more gently than Harry was on Draco's feet, and Harry leaned silently into it. Draco sighed, a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of his socks.

"So. We have implications that you're a traitor _and _a bloody Golden Boy _and _a masochist all at once, that you're degrading me, that you're unfaithful, that I'm a blood purist, that _I'm _a blood traitor, and that our relationship is probably based on pure physical lust with nothing redeeming about it." Draco paused thoughtfully. "Did I miss anything?"

Harry swallowed. "No, I think that's pretty much it," he managed to say, around the tightness that had got into his throat.

Draco nodded, and leaned forwards. Harry cast a glance at him and then turned away again. He couldn't face what gleamed at him from Draco's eyes at the moment.

"I know, and you know, that's not true," Draco continued, not gently so much as neutrally, without a lot of emphasis. "How long did you have to try and persuade me to give it a go? And once we actually started living together instead of dating, who was the one who wanted to move out and was ranting and screaming that nothing between us would work?"

"Me, for the last one," Harry snapped. "And you shouldn't have called Hermione a Mudblood."

Draco found his hand and squeezed. "The _point is_," he said, "that you were willing to walk away from me when you thought it wouldn't work. You don't hate yourself enough to continue sleeping with someone who hates you. And blood purist politics make you crazy. You were going to walk away."

Harry nodded. "I just—Draco, you don't have to reassure me. I know what Lark said isn't true. It just made me angry."

"And yet, here I am," Draco said, and pushed him again. "You would have walked away. I don't fancy you for your fame, or I would have pushed you to use it more. You get out of sight all you can, and you even refused Kingsley when he tried to promote you that last time. _I _think youngest Head Auror ever would sound good. Right up there with 'youngest Seeker in a century.'"

Harry smiled, but couldn't look at him.

"I'm going to prepare a nasty potion for Lark precisely because he's making me waste all this time on reassurance that ought to be unnecessary," Draco declared, with another haughty sniff. "_In the meantime. _What did you do after he said that?"

"Walked out," Harry said, eyes closed a little as he tried to remember what he had probably looked like when he stormed out of the office, at least from Lark's perspective. He couldn't, though. The words had echoed in his head and taken all his time, to the point where he only wanted to Apparate home and go to bed. "I was too angry."

"You know," Draco began, in a coaxing tone so gentle that Harry knew what would come next.

"No," he snapped, sitting up and pushing at Draco's feet to get them off his lap.

"Oh, fuck off," Draco said, and reached out to push his shoulder again, this time hard enough to knock Harry backwards. "You're happy enough to take the potions I make when people say shit like this and pour them down those people's throats, but you won't use your own strength."

Harry closed his eyes, and tried not to remember the last time he had done that, the time Draco was talking about. How the woman who had implied that Draco was unfaithful to him had ended up in the middle of a storm of glass shards as all the mirrors in the training room—meant to give the Aurors practice with reflecting curses—tore loose and whirled towards her.

Harry had stopped before he did much more than puncture her shoulders and arms. But it could have been so much worse. So easily.

"I trust you to hold back," Harry whispered. "You said—you keep saying that Potions is a moderate art. Draco, I _can't. _I don't trust myself. I don't hold back. When I heard what Lark said, I had to walk out of there without looking back, or I don't know what I would have done."

"Bollocks," Draco said, but his voice was milder, probably because Harry had repeated one of the dictums _Draco _was always repeating and admitted it might be true. "You managed to hold back today."

"For fear of what I might do."

Draco gave an ungraceful snort. "If you really didn't care about what you might do, you'd simply unleash." He shoved Harry again when he opened his mouth. "But I'll brew the potion that I think Lark deserves for this. And you can pour it into the congratulatory drink that of course you'll buy him after you work on this case together."

"It has to be after the case?" Harry demanded, snapping his eyes open to turn and look at Draco.

"Of course it does," Draco said. "That way, blame is less likely to attach to you. Otherwise, it might seem like a political attack on Calpurnia Lark's favorite nephew. But this way, it's just an unfortunate coincidence. Oh, not that Lark won't suspect the truth and know what he shouldn't say in the future, but timing is everything." Then he grinned, making him look several years brighter and wilder. "Besides, the aconite has to steep, and that takes a while."

"What kind of potion are you making?" Harry demanded. He couldn't think of any good ones that needed aconite.

Draco looked at him innocently. "A potion that will make his penis shrink. Don't worry, it stops when it's the size of a pimple."

Harry stared at him. Then he put his hand over his face and shook his head back and forth. "He'll suspect it was me who put it in his drink, even if I wait until after the case is over," he muttered.

"I know," Draco said. "That's the _point. _There's no one who can make the antidote to this particular potion except me." He reached out and smoothed his hand up and down Harry's shoulder this time, instead of pushing him. "So he'll have to come to you and beg pardon to get the antidote."

"But if he complains and gets us in trouble?"

Draco grinned, a narrow grin that had too many teeth. "Your popularity can protect you there. And he can't do anything to me. This potion isn't illegal because no one knows about it. People already distrust me and gossip about me. If he threatens me with that, I can ask him whether it will really _change _my life." He took Harry's hand and lifted it to his lips. "And if it turns out that he's making it unendurable to be an Auror, well, you could quit if you wanted to. Become a consultant. Become a private duelist. Become a bodyguard. Become a protector of helpless little kittens and puppies. I'm not worried about you. I know that you'll always find someone to protect."

"You're not one of them," Harry whispered, leaning into Draco and kissing him, because Draco had sounded half-resentful.

"I know," Draco said, and gave Harry that smile in turn. "I'm one of the only people who gets to protect _you_ instead."

Harry leaned briefly on him, just briefly, since it was all Draco would allow, and closed his eyes. "Thank you."

"Your thanking me is embarrassing," Draco said. "It would never _end_, because of all the things you have to be grateful for, and I do have a potion to brew." He reached out and caught Harry's hands, drawing him to his feet. "Come to bed, then, and I'll show you how to thank me properly."

Harry smiled as he followed. He probably shouldn't be enjoying the thought of his revenge on Lark as much as he was. Hermione would scold him for enjoying something so immoral and distressing.

But he knew the price if he was going to bask in the flash and glitter of Draco's thoughts, and he had chosen, long ago, to embrace it. There could be no price too great for being here.

**The End.**


End file.
